“The Power Hidden in a
Choice” December 31, 2017 Dr.
Roger Ray
“Treacherous, Hopeful, Two Faced God”
Every new day is a doorway into the future
Though the door is never entirely closed
So that the past can, through obsession or stealth,
Come quietly through to steal the new, poisoning it with memory.
This day is no better and no worse than any other
Good and ill are concealed in every choice, every turn of the
doorknob
Though many deserve blame
Only one holds the key and with both regret and resolve
we each acknowledge that “I am that one.”
By Roger Ray
In seminary you are asked
to choose a major. At Vanderbilt we could major in church history, preaching
and worship, ethics, biblical studies, or counseling. You had to get several
hours credit in all five areas but you had to specialize in one. I was serving
a county seat church in Kentucky while I was in grad school and I found out
pretty quickly that I already knew more about the bible, philosophy, religious
history and liturgy than my folks really wanted to hear but the one area where
I was consistently being made to feel entirely inadequate was in counseling.
I was 22 years old and I
had emerged from about the most naive, milk-toast, puritanical families in the
world but I was daily sitting alone and talking to senior adults who had been raped
when they were children, who struggled with addictions to drugs, alcohol,
pornography, and shopping. Visiting in parishioner’s homes I discovered that
some of my folks were obsessive hoarders, others were hiding domestic violence,
or criminal behavior.
I went to Vanderbilt to
get a Phd in New Testament but ended up getting a masters and a doctorate in
counseling because I was trying to become prepared to actually help my
congregation to deal with the challenges of life.
One of the most important
accidents during that time of my life was the offer I made to a chronic
alcoholic who enjoyed talking to me every week but who I was not helping. His
family had disowned him. His employer had fired him. And his health was
crumbling. He didn’t want to go to A.A. meetings but I offered to go with him
if he would go. Having a young companion seemed to satisfy him and we started
going to a meeting in the basement of the Methodist church just outside of
Russellville, KY.
In the course of the
evening the room would fill with cigarette smoke so that you couldn’t even see
the people on the other side of the folding table but you could hear their
stories. What I heard in those meetings was the certain claim that alcoholism was
not a moral failing, it was a disease but, unlike most other diseases, there
was no surgery and no medication to help. A.A. insisted that the disease only
had a spiritual cure. Only God could save them.
Naming addiction a
disease relieved the addict of the guilt that everyone else had heaped upon
them. Regardless of the condemnation of parents, the anger of spouses and
children, and the various casualties of the intoxication, it ultimately wasn’t
their fault. It was the disease.
I believe that they were
sincere in what they said about turning their lives over to “God as they
understood God – their higher power” but all of the conversations revolved
about what they did to maintain their sobriety.
They talked about “stinking
thinking” that could lead them down the path of drinking again. They talked
about the dubious luxury of anger, the necessity of letting go of resentment,
of embracing forgiveness, of accepting that other people messed up and did
things wrong but you didn’t have to let the memories of those things occupy all
of the vacant space inside your skull.
My doctoral project was
on monastic spirituality and what I found remarkable was how much of what I was
reading from ancient monastic sources: St Bernard of Clarevaux, The Rule of St.
Benedict, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, The Sayings of the Desert
Fathers, The Imitation of Christ . . . sure, the ancient spiritual writings
sounded like monks talking and A.A. literature sounds like drunks talking but
the drunks were a lot easier to understand and in the end they were saying many
of the same things.
The Desert Fathers say, “Even
if you were to raise the dead, if you are angry, you are unacceptable to God.”
A.A. will tell you that if you stay mad at your ex-wife or if you keep
wallowing in why your mother didn’t love you that you are never going to get
sober. And many times they will add, “even if you quit drinking you’ll never
get sober.” A.A. talks about the “dry drunk” – the person who has managed to
stay off the booze but they still act mean and crazy so sobriety hasn’t done
much for them.
Both my ancient monks and
my friends in A.A. talked a lot about God but everything they said about how
their faith impacted them had to do with them getting their thinking straight
and taking control of the appetites.
There is no cure for alcoholism
that does not rest on the alcoholic’s decision that they are not going to
drink. And they eschew grandiose claims of “I’ll never drink again!” They will
say, “I’m not going to drink today.” And on bad days, they might have to divide
that day up into pieces: I’m not going
to drink this morning. I’m not going to drink this hour, or in the next minute.
They find strength in a
community that is united in their desire to be sober. They often have a sponsor
who is a specific person they can call if their strength is waning. Lots of people
have a sponsor and they are simultaneously a sponsor to one other two other
people as they all work together to help one another reach their spiritual goal
which they often call sobriety but we might also call sanity or, more
specifically, health.
I have known very many
people in the program who will say that they are actually thankful for having
been an alcoholic because their obvious addiction led them to a program in
which they found something that was much more important than just not drinking.
At this time of year,
this entirely arbitrary holiday when we turn over the calendar to a new year,
many people will take the symbolic change of numbers to make personal
resolutions about how they will choose to live differently in the coming year
than they have in the past year. It is no accident that in the last week of the
year and the first week of the new year that all of the ads on TV are for
diets, exercise equipment, and gym memberships.
And as important as diet
and exercise can be, that’s just the vain surface issue compared to the larger
issue of choosing to be healthy.
The Romans had a two-faced
god named Janus, from whom we get the name January for the first month of the
year. Janus was often portrayed as a doorway so that one side always faced
where you have been and the other faced where you are going. As with our
history of monastic saints and friends in 12-step recovery programs, the talk
about a god is really expressing an awareness of the vitality of our own
choices.
In the poem about Janus I
wrote for our wisdom lesson today, what I want to point out is the obvious
truth that the door never seems to be locked. The past can always come into the
future to poison us. The stinkin thinking that can lead an alcoholic back to
the bottle is the same as the resentment that keeps us throwing another log on
the fire of our depression, our anger, our rage over past hurts, disappointments
and betrayals.
Thomas Merton said that
the most difficult but the most necessary of all renunciations in the spiritual
journey is resentment. The question that I would like to pose to you today is
not just what you plan to resolve to do in 2018 but rather, how much of 2017,
and 2016, and that year when you got fired, when your spouse cheated on you,
that time you had to leave school . . . how much of that are you going to carry
through the door into the next year?
Most addictions are
rooted in self-medication. It is an illness alright, often times an illness of
having too good of a memory. People medicate themselves with alcohol, heroin,
meth, TV, the internet, Face Book, gambling, in order to silence their memory.
Why will people go into a casino and sit in front of a slot machine without
moving, forgetting to eat or even go to the bathroom, for hours?
Psychologically, it isn’t
so much the thrill of the unknown outcome because it is no great mystery what
the outcome is going to be. Gambling creates what we call a “present moment.”
Most of the time we are thinking about the past or anticipating the future.
Gambling creates a present moment in which you have let go of the past and you
are not thinking about the future. You are fully present to that moment. Most
addictions work that way. When your kids are playing video games for hours,
they have given up their anxieties, their sense of powerlessness, their fear of
failure, and they are in the moment. Getting high does that. Getting drunk does
that. And, here’s the real kicker for church folk, meditative prayer does that.
When I was much more involved
in a counseling practice I once asked a psychology professor why it was that
almost all of the Borderline Personality Disordered clients I saw had an alcoholic
parent but when they didn’t the parents were usually rigid teetotalers who were
deeply involved in fundamentalist religion. And he said, “What’s the
difference, both fundamentalist and alcoholics are addicted to a drug that
makes them unreliable and emotionally unreachable.”
Casinos are very
carefully designed to remove you from reality. There are no windows, no clocks,
it is always a little cooler than might be considered to be comfortable, and
the slot machines are loud and repetitive, almost hypnotic. Isn’t it odd at
mega churches are built with no windows or clocks, and they are always a little
cooler than might be comfortable, and the music is always very loud and
repetitive? Both give you a sense of being in a present moment while you are
being robbed of all of your money. . . but that’s not really any of my
business.
Whether it is drugs,
alcohol, gambling, or religion, or even obsessively playing video games, scrolling
down Face Book, or locking into your favorite polemic hysterical news station,
wouldn’t it be healthier to just let go of the past rather than trying to drown
it out with noise and drugs? I’m not saying you haven’t been hurt. I’m not
saying that you have to get amnesia but, honestly, how much space in your skull
do you want to rent to that stuff?
I think that one of the
most powerful images in the metaphor of the resurrection of Jesus is that he
still had the wounds in his hands and feet and in his side. He refused to stay
dead but the crucifixion was real. Your memory of your past may be exaggerated
or altered but, I feel ya, it was real enough, it was bad enough, it was
painful enough, and aren’t we glad that’s over now? Or it can be, if you are
ready for it to be over.
So far as we know, the
only reason that shock therapy works when it does work is that repeated shocks
will cause short term memory loss, literally giving the mental patient a chance
to think again without the cloud of obsessive remembering.
In a few minutes you are
going to be invited to come up here for communion. I would like to invite you
to think about all of the hurt, all of the resentment, all of the people you
can’t help but hate a little bit, and I want you to imagine that you are
leaving all of that behind when you walk up to the table to take communion. You
can choose to turn the door knob, walk away from that stuff, and never take it
back.
A lot of you are going to
be going out tonight and New Year’s Eve is famous for armature drinkers giving
themselves something to deeply regret on January 1. Be careful but do celebrate
the end of a long and challenging year and choose to enter 2018 with resolve to
let go of the demons that have haunted you.
As they say in A.A., Don’t
think about how sick you have been, think about how well that you want to be.
